


nowhere now (but here)

by HearJessRoar



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Blood, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing It Better, M/M, Minor Injuries, Panic Attacks, mysteriously injured after bein real dead a real long time, theyre soft boyfriends ur honor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29127642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: Nothing about the afterlife makes any sense, especially not right now.Alex is dead and there's blood on his drumsticks.
Relationships: Alex Mercer/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 222





	nowhere now (but here)

Alex stares down at his hand.

It feels like he's never seen it before.

It's disconnected from his body it's somebody else's hand it’s not his hand how could it be looking like _that_ -

He's _dead_.

Alex is dead and there's blood on his drumsticks.

_breathe_

They hit the cement floor of the studio with a clatter, bouncing off the toe of his sneaker. Tremors rock through his arms as he stares.

It's not an unusual injury for a drummer, he thinks dully, his eyes refusing to focus on his torn skin. He's ripped those calluses a thousand times over.

But not since death.

_BREATHE_

A sickly thin red rivulet creeps downwards across his palm, feathering into the lines.

He's a ghost.

He doesn't _have_ blood.

Right?

_**BREATHE** _

This shouldn't be happening he hasn't so much as had a scratch since he died he told Julie they were practically unbreakable and Caleb's weird painful jolts aside he got smacked off his feet by a ghost going full tilt on a skateboard and didn't even get a bruise this doesn't make any sense his hands shouldn't look like this like he's fresh meat behind the kit with brand new blisters-

"Alex, _breathe_!"

Someone else's hands, not the someone else whose hands are somehow attached to his wrists not them but someone with warm familiar fingers and cold cold rings on his jaw and bracelets jingling-

Willie’s voice, Willie's hands, Willie’s eyes, burning a hole right into his heart, right in front of him how does he know how does he always know when he's needed it's gotta be a ghost power he's unlocked over the years because-

"Alex, c'mon man, you gotta come back-"

Warm chapped lips on his forehead.

And Alex gasps.

His lungs fill with air that he doesn't remember ever tasting so sharp, burning in his chest as he takes in as much as he can.

"Okay no, that's hyperventilating, _shit_ -"

Willie presses the back of Alex’s hand to his own chest. "C'mon, breathe with me, easy as…breathing...I guess…"

He takes deep, exaggerated breaths and holds them, gesturing at Alex to follow along with the rise and fall of his chest. His necklace shakes loose and dangles right into Alex’s palm.

He closes his fingers around the key without thinking, the teeth of it biting into his freshly injured skin.

The new wave of pain that shoots through his hand is somehow exactly what he needs to force his head above the proverbial water of his brain, and he yelps as the fog lifts. He jerks his hand back automatically, but Willie still has ahold of his wrist, and he ends up yanking Willie forward too. He manages to keep his footing, but lets go of Alex’s wrist.

"Hey, there you are," Willie says, his other hand still on Alex's jaw. His thumb strokes Alex’s cheek softly. "Had me scared, hot dog."

Alex feels like he's just run ten miles, a bone deep exhaustion sinking onto him like a blanket.

His hands are still bleeding.

He gestures with them uselessly, his mouth refusing to make words work properly.

Willie nods. "Got a first aid kit?"

"Bathroom." He manages to get out around how thick his tongue feels.

"Alright. Up," Willie says, wrapping his hands around Alex's biceps. Alex tries to stand and finds that his legs have turned to jelly when he wasn't looking. His knees give out and he staggers.

Willie catches him, but just barely, wrapping his arms tightly around Alex's waist instead. "You're trying to hurt yourself worse here," he mutters, shifting so he's supporting Alex as best he can.

He half-drags Alex across the studio, Alex doing his best to make his feet obey just a little bit better than they are, and kind of still failing at it. Instead he focuses on keeping his hands elevated and away from Willie.

He already bled on his house key, but he still doesn’t think it’s very polite to bleed on people if he can help it.

Willie kicks open the door with the toe of his sneaker and props Alex against the frame while he goes to shuffle under the sink.

The studio bathroom is pretty bare bones, a three-quarters bath, but the Molinas keep a well stocked first aid kit in it. Julie has brought it out once or twice when she’d managed to give herself a particularly nasty papercut. Up until now, Alex had never thought he’d need it.

Willie makes a triumphant noise, straightening up from where he's been hunched over to dig through the cabinet. He holds the box aloft and gives it a little shake. Alex can’t help the way his lips quirk, amused despite himself.

He feels a little bit better, more like his legs will hold him up again. But his mind is still spinning in circles because there’s no way this should be possible because he’s _dead_ , he’s been dead for twenty five whole years, he doesn’t even have veins anymore and he’s pretty sure that he exists as like a shadow of a memory of a person or something like that but okay sure he’s bleeding now. Why not. 

Not even the weirdest thing he’s seen this month. He gives up.

“Okay, c’mere, wash your hands out-”

Alex fights the urge to roll his eyes, because if this were anyone else telling him how to treat an injury he’s managed a hundred times before, he’d snap at them. But it’s Willie, and Willie is very clearly worried about him, and why shouldn’t he be he just walked in on Alex mid panic attack-

He shuffles over to the sink and lets Willie hold his hands under the water. It stings against his skin and he can’t help that he hisses through his teeth. Willie rubs his thumb over one of his palms apologetically.

When Willie shuts off the faucet and grabs for the towel on the rack, Alex pulls away. The towel is white, and he really doesn’t want to explain to Julie what happened when she sees it later. But Willie dabs carefully around his injury, the torn blisters and old calluses still bleeding sluggishly, until his hands are dry.

“So this part is gonna completely suck, and I don’t even know if this actually does anything, but my mom always made me do this when I wiped out,” Willie says, grabbing for a brown bottle of peroxide he’s pulled from under the sink. “Sorry in advance.”

Alex’s mom had made him do this too, and he’s used to the sting of peroxide. Normally, he’d put it on a cotton pad or something though; Willie just makes him hold his hands over the sink and pours directly from the bottle onto his fingers.

He grits his teeth; peroxide only hurts for a second and he knows this and he tells himself it’s what has to be done but _damn_ he still really hates it. Willie winces in sympathy.

“-sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry-” he mumbles under his breath as he caps the bottle again. The chemical bubbles and pops on Alex’s palms.

The burn of it fades away as quickly as it came, the torn skin still looking raw, but cleaner at least. Considering the job done, Alex moves to help Willie deal with the supplies he’s dug out of the first aid box, and is surprised when Willie levels him with an annoyed look.

“What are you doing.”

“Uh...”

“Sit on the sink, I don’t trust you to stay still.”

Willie pulls a roll of gauze out of the kit, and Alex does roll his eyes this time. “Babe, that’s kind of overkill-”

“Don’t _babe_ me. Get on the counter.”

Alex considers it’s probably for the best that he listens, and shoves himself up on the counter of the sink with the heels of his hands for support, careful not to touch anything with his freshly cleaned blisters. He rests the backs of his hands on his thighs as Willie digs out a tiny tube of antibiotic ointment from the depths of the case.

He grabs for Alex’s left hand first, and daubs out a generous amount of the ointment. And something about the way Willie is so focused on his task as he cuts a length of gauze with the junky little scissors from the kit, and the way his eyes linger on Alex’s palm sets off a swarm of butterflies in Alex’s stomach.

Nobody has bandaged up his hands for him since he was twelve years old, sitting on the lid of the toilet in his mom’s bathroom, sniffling while she hummed a song for him and kissed his fingers to make it all better.

He misses the woman he’d thought she was.

Alex hates the way that thought strikes him the way it does, here with this amazing boy trying his best to make his hurt go away. It’s too quiet in the bathroom, and quiet makes his head wander, and unfortunately for him it likes to wander all the way back home, back to his mom and to his sister and honestly, that’s not a place he wants to be right now, not with Willie in front of him tending to his pain the way he is. He forces his attention back to the vague sting in his hands instead, and hopes that whatever comes out of his mouth doesn’t have anything embarrassing in it for once.

“This used to happen when we’d do too many hours of rehearsal,” he says. “Usually I’d just wash ‘em with peroxide and not bother with a band aid. Probably why my hands are so gnarly, huh?”

Willie, in the middle of making sure the gauze covers a particularly raw area at the joint where Alex’s index finger meets his palm, pauses and looks up. His brows are furrowed.

“Your hands aren’t _gnarly_ , man.” he says quietly. Alex swallows around the sudden lump in his throat.

Because _yes they are_ , he’s got musician hands, drummer’s hands, he knows he does. His calluses match his sticks and he knows they’re rough and he doesn’t take particularly good care of them, he never has. He remembers comparing blisters with Luke for laughs back when they had only just started playing and he’d never thought about how they would feel to someone else until Willie had grabbed his hand outside the museum and he was suddenly extremely aware of the tough skin on his finger joints and how unpleasant it felt even to himself.

Willie ties off the gauze and moves on to the other hand, doling out more ointment. He starts in on wrapping more gauze where it needs to be, and Alex is a little bit hypnotized by the motion of it, the surety of Willie’s hands as his fingers graze so softly against Alex’s.

Every brush of his fingertips sends an electric spark down Alex’s spine, and Alex can’t decide if he wants it to stop or if he wants to bask in the feeling for the rest of eternity.

He finishes with the second hand and Alex tries to pull away, sure that this time he’s free to go. But Willie keeps ahold of his wrist, and if Alex’s heart was still beating (was it now? How could he bleed without a beating heart anyway?) he’s sure it would stutter as Willie ghosts his mouth so lightly over where he’s just bandaged that Alex can barely feel the pressure of it.

He does it again to the other hand, and Alex’s breath is caught in his chest, tangled in his lungs and stuck in his throat as Willie pulls away, running his thumbs over Alex’s palms again.

“I like your hands,” Willie murmurs, his thumbs continuing that _back and forth_ motion, the one he does when he’s anxious, sweeping across the life lines on Alex’s hands. He looks up at Alex from under his eyelashes, looking suddenly very shy. “I like _you._ ”

And Alex can’t help that he ducks his head to press his lips to Willie’s, he can’t, he’s pretty sure that it’d have been a crime _not_ to kiss him at that point, and he’s nothing if not a law abiding citizen of the afterlife.

“How do you always know when I need you,” he breathes as they break apart.

Willie gives a little huff through his nose, smiling even as he blushes a delighted pink. He’s still holding on to Alex’s hands. “I didn’t. Actually,” he says, his face twisting up with embarrassment. “I wiped out on my board at the pier and was having my own little freak out.”

He steps back and gestures down to his calf. Something in Alex’s stomach drops like a stone. Dread or anxiety, he doesn’t know which.

Because Willie has scrapes up and down his leg, scabbed over already, and he knows for a fact that _that isn’t normal._

Willie sees the look on his face and immediately is in his space again, his hands resting on Alex’s thighs as he stands between his knees to get as close as he can before Alex panics.

“Hey, don’t go back there, ‘lex. It’s okay,”

“How can it be okay, what is _even happening_ -”

Willie’s hands come up to cup his jaw, forcing Alex into looking him in the eye. And Alex can see that behind the resolution to keep him from freaking out again, Willie is scared too.

He doesn’t know what’s going either, and making him calm Alex down while he’s afraid himself just doesn’t seem fair, so Alex tamps down his anxiety as best he can for the time being. He takes a deep breath through his nose, and lets his shoulders slump as he lets it out.

He gives Willie a weak little grin, and wraps his arms around Willie’s waist to tug him into a tight hug. Willie falls into him easily, tension bleeding out of him as his own arms wind around Alex’s neck, and Alex feels a pang of deep guilt when he realizes that Willie has been worried this whole time.

He doesn’t know how any of this is possible, but whatever is happening, he’s at least comforted by the fact that they’re facing it together.

Under his bandages, his hands pulse with a nonexistent heartbeat.

**Author's Note:**

> hi guys! this is my 20th jatp fic, can you believe that???
> 
> i hope you liked it and that the premise wasn't too offputting, i know a lot of people don't like blood, and now i have a lot of pictures of drummer blisters in my search history. which. ew.
> 
> that one hand bandaging scene in pirates of the caribbean changed a generation is all im sayin
> 
> anyway i hope this was a good 20th fic, i hope you liked it, pls comment and let me know, and then go read my other 19 if you haven't already bc i do love to share them!!!


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